And you are here why?

From the ever excellent Bonker's World , comes this handy reference chart - Roles in the IT World

God is where the opportunistic believer wants him to be. via Ta-Nehisi Coates The rest of the section goes as follows... Theology is like any other ideology. If the scholars of your ideology profess its great wisdom, despite crucial moral problems; and if you then take up that ideology, in full knowledge of those problems; if you argue that it should be elevated to law of the land; if you assert that it should then be imposed on half the country (not your half), you are not a bystander to immorality. You are an accomplice.   Amen...

From Stephen Wildish - go there and root around for other such fun stuff... (click to embiggen)

From the ever amazing Paul Crowley , we have this amazing Margin Bargraph (click to embiggen) Note that this is just an image, go to the original for an interactive original ... (Additional Information via Paul)----> To make sense of any of this you must understand the   Electoral College . Red states   are states that went for   McCain in 2008 . Blue states   are states that went for   Obama in 2008 . States in the band with a pale blue background at the top of the diagram have been called by the networks for Obama. States in the band with a pale red background at the bottom of the diagram have been called by the networks for Romney. States to the left   of the line are   projected to go for Obama . States to the right   of the line are   projected to go for Romney . The further left or right they extend, the further the projected margin of victory. The vertical direction is measured in   electoral votes The thicker the bar for a state is, the more electoral vote

From the (Demented? Depraved? Diabolical? Definitely brilliant) mind of Jörg Sprave comes the definitive guide to Weaponizing your Office . (Click image below to embiggen. A lot.)

From the minds at Otaat (One Thing At A Time), comes the ultimate in Fetish-wear - party hats . Just the thing to accesorize with your cod-piece, eh? There are some things that I just can't make up...

From the brilliant minds of Ryan Sohmer and Lar Desouza we have this episode of Least I Could Do Pretty much sez. it all...

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up . Denny's - that fine purveyor of Calories - now has a "middle-earth" themed menu.  For proof, view the profoundly cringe-inducing ad from their campaign above. Assuming you didn't throw up, you're probably strong enough to stomach the contents of the menu, which includes such awesome fare as Gandalf's Gobble Melt Radagast's Red Velvet Pancake Puppies Frodo's Pot Roast Skillet Hobbit Harvest Pie and lord knows what else. I bet if we hooked up a generator to Tolkien's remains, we could power Boston.  For completeness' sake, i've attached the menu to this post - please don't read it

For sheer yumminess - as well as dangerous-ness to those around you - this one has few peers.  Its basically a mix of garbanzo beans, salt/pepper, and garlic, and boy is it ever good. Ingredients 1 lb cooked Garbanzo beans 1 garlic clove (raw or roasted) 1/4th tsp kosher salt 1 tbsp olive oil (or more, if you're feeling suitable evil) 1 tsp coarsely crushed black pepper Mush the kosher salt and garlic in a mortar/pestle thoroughly till it forms a smooth paste (around 10 seconds).  Add around four of the garbanzo beans to the mortar, and mush that in for around 10 more seconds. Add the olive oil and pepper and mush it all together till you have what is basically a garbanzo salad dressing. Drop this - somewhat unappetizing appearing - "dressing" into the rest of the garbanzo beans and mix it all together. If necessary, add some more kosher salt. Eat. Enjoy. Breathe. (Hopefully not on anybody that hasn't eaten this too) Incidentally.... Garbanz

Because there are few things as entertaining as being entertaining...

The Sheep Market - a collection of 10,000 sheep that were created by workers on Mechanical Turk. The rules were pretty simple, $0.02 to draw a sheep facing left . Interesting factoids Average time per sheep : 105 seconds Average cost/hour : $0.69/hour Number of rejected sheep : 662 Number of unique IPs : 7599 Build rate : 11 sheep/hour  The image below is just that, and image.  Click here to go the the actual site ...

The failure rates for startups is 30 - 90% , depending on how you define "failure".  That said, the failure rate for tech / VC based startups is really pretty far along on the 90% end of the scale .  The point here? MongoDB is remarkably good, useful, and effective at rapid prototyping, and quick development.  Oh, it may have any number of issues at scaling, data integrity, etc., but it is - really - way cool when it comes to Just Getting Something Out There. Putting the two together MongoDB - because if your startup is destined to fail, you may as well Fail Fast

In case you missed it, Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley just won the 2012 Economics Nobel (ok, technically the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics Sciences). Shapley you should know from the Stable Marriage Problem w/ a nifty example here . TL;DR --> " Each person has a preference list of the folks of the opposite gender. A pair of people of opposite genders that like each other better than their respective spouses is an instability. How can we pair up all the folks so there are no such instabilities? " Al Roth (blog here ), extended this into all sorts of areas, and in particular in the world of organ trading, horse meat, and other such "repugnant" markets. The highpoint - IMHO is his glorious paper "Repugnance as a constraint on markets " (go read it), which includes a section on dwarf-tossing. Yup. Dwarf-tossing . To quote To clarify ideas about repugnance, it may be helpful to look at a relatively uncomplicated case, in which little

From conflicthistory.com comes this Visualization Gem - a Google Mapped timeline of (AFAICT) every conflict in human history. Ok, it may not have this one time when I got in a fight in 2nd grade, but boy howdy, is it every comprehensive - pretty much everything from 3000BC through 2005. As an added bonus, you can click on the marker and pop over to the associated wikipedia entry. The image below is just that, an image (albeit a humongous one).  Click here to go to the actual site and have your mind blown..

All discussions about MongoDB will eventually include the phrase " It's there in the documentation " Corollary All sins are forgiven if they are documented beforehand Note Seriously, I don't care how bloody carefully it is documented, the default behavior of a database should not include silently losing information.  

Hmmm. While I was away, Tilera seems to have expanded from their 64 core start to a whole plethora of CPUs.  There are 9 , 16 , and 36 CPU models - I suppose to support people who actually want fewer cores in their servers. Mind you, that could make sense from a power perspective - if you don't need the capacity, why burn up juice? Then again, if you're running things at a scale where you actually worry about power consumption, I'd probably guess that you want the cores. Anyhow, they're out there, for those who want 'em. That said, I wonder what happened to the 100 core model.  Its referenced all over the place on their product pages , but I don't see any product literature...